Professional Documents
Culture Documents
The Soviet Union lasted as long as it did because it disciplined (often through
terror) most, rewarded many, and attracted a strategically loyal few for at least
ªfty of [its] seventy-four years.
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Bohdan Nahaylo and Victor Swoboda, Soviet Disunion: A History of the Nationalities Problem in the
USSR (New York: Free Press, 1990); Richard L. Rudolph and David F. Good, eds., Nationalism and
Empire: The Habsburg Empire and the Soviet Union (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992); Rupert Em-
erson, From Empire to Nation: The Rise to Self-assertion of Asian and African Peoples (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1960); Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, The End of the Soviet Empire: The Triumph of the Nations
(New York: Basic Books, 1993); William W. Haddad and William Ochsenwald, eds., Nationalism in a
Non-National State: The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire (Columbus: Ohio State University Press,
1977); Charles Jelavich, Tsarist Russia and Balkan Nationalism: Russian Inºuence in the Internal Affairs
of Bulgaria and Serbia, 1879–1886 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958); Susan L. Wood-
ward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War (Washington, DC: Brookings Institu-
tion, 1995); John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994); and
Walter C. Clemens, “Who or What Killed the Soviet Union? How Three Davids Undermined Goli-
ath,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Spring 1997), p. 136–158.
3. This argument contradicts the assertion that nationalism was the central cause of Soviet disintegra-
tion. See, for example, Ben Fowkes, The Disintegration of the Soviet Union: The Triumph of National-
ism (London: Macmillan, 1997). It is also more nuanced than analyses that regard the disintegration
of the Soviet Union as somehow inevitable. This latter tendency has become all too common in recent
years, even among sophisticated observers such as Victor Zaslavsky, “The Soviet Union,” in Karen
Barkey and Mark von Hagen, eds., After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building (Boulder:
Westview Press, 1996), pp. 73–74.
4. For a thorough discussion of this topic, see Marc Zlotnik, “Yeltsin and Gorbachev: The Politics of
Confrontation,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Winter 2003), pp. 128–164.
82
Nationalism, Ethnic Pressures, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union
The Soviet Union throughout its history suffered from deeply en-
trenched problems in what was traditionally called the “nationalities” sphere.
In particular, the fateful decision to set up a federal structure along ethno-
territorial lines and to maintain strong linguistic and cultural distinctions
among many of the constituent units, created an inherent weakness in the
state. When the Soviet Union broke apart, it did so precisely along the lines
that divided its former union republics. Until the late 1980s this inherent
structural weakness was of little importance, but the political and ideological
liberalization under Gorbachev allowed nationalism and ethnic pressures to
reach a level of intensity unprecedented since the federated union was formed
in 1922.
Even so, it is important to emphasize that nationalist and ethnic factors
were not sufªcient to cause the Soviet state to fall apart. These factors, in iso-
lation, would not have created an immediate, inexorable force for disintegra-
tion. Although nationalist ªssures seriously challenged the cohesion of the So-
viet Union, other variables ultimately made the Soviet state untenable. These
other factors included Gorbachev’s failure to create and implement a renewed
compact between center and periphery early in the period of perestroika, his
aversion to using decisive force to quell nationalist demands, and his inability
to stave off the challenge from Yeltsin.
The article is divided into four main sections. The ªrst section deªnes
key terms used throughout the article—nation, nationalism, ethnic pressures,
and empire—and explains why the multiethnic Soviet state can be regarded as
an empire. The second section describes developments in the Soviet nationali-
ties sphere prior to Gorbachev, highlighting the compact between center and
periphery that helped maintain stability in the Soviet Union for many dec-
ades. This section also emphasizes two factors that undermined Soviet cohe-
sion over time:
The ªrst factor led to the structural vulnerability of the Soviet state, and the
second produced grievances against the center that fueled separatist national-
ism under the vastly more open regime of Gorbachev. After brieºy discussing
83
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these factors, the second section gives an overview of the most salient ethnic
and nationalist disturbances before Gorbachev’s rule and assesses their cumu-
lative impact on the integrity of the Soviet state.
The third section focuses on the intensiªcation of nationalism and ethnic
pressures in 1988–1991. It describes the character and impact of separatist
nationalism (in the Baltic states, Georgia, Armenia, Moldova, and Ukraine);
ethnic conºicts (in Nagorno-Karabakh, Moldova, Central Asia, and the re-
gions of South Ossetia and Abkhaziya in Georgia); and demographic, reli-
gious, and linguistic pressures. How did the state respond to these challenges,
and to what extent did they erode Soviet cohesion? This section also describes
the nature of Russia’s defection from the Soviet fold, a defection that was a key
variable in the unraveling of the state. The section concludes by brieºy tracing
a related phenomenon that contributed to imperial disintegration—namely,
the breakdown of the economic linkage between center and periphery.
The fourth section discusses the cumulative effect of ethnic and national-
ist pressures in weakening the Soviet state. These pressures were signiªcant,
but the article points to a number of other factors that were instrumental in
the demise of the Soviet Union: the failure to achieve a viable compact be-
tween center and periphery during Gorbachev’s initial years in power, Gorba-
chev’s general unwillingness to use force decisively and efªciently to quell un-
rest and other challenges to the Soviet regime, and the deliberate steps taken
by Yeltsin and the Russian government.5
Some concepts inevitably provoke scholarly quarrels. Such is the case with na-
tion, nationalism, and empires. There are numerous deªnitions of national-
ism,6 but in this chapter it refers to a political ideology7 consisting of three ba-
5. There were, of course, other factors that contributed to the demise of the Soviet Union—economic
problems, external pressures such as the arms race with the United States, as well as the process of po-
litical liberalization and glasnost’—but these are not the focus of this chapter. Also, I do not argue that
the Soviet Union could have survived indeªnitely (though I do not rule out the possibility). Instead, I
contend that it did not have to collapse when it did, whether because of nationalist and ethnic pres-
sures or for other reasons. Stronger resolve from the center to maintain the empire, including through
the consistent use of force in the late 1980s, 1990, or even as late as early 1991 (during the crackdown
in the Baltic republics), could have preserved its life certainly beyond 1991.
6. For example, Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm deªne nationalism as a “political principle which
holds that the political and national unit should be congruent,” and Hans Kohn deªnes it as a “state of
mind” in which the individual’s supreme loyalty is to the nation-state. Echoing Kohn, Liah Greenfeld
asserts that nationalism is a “particular perspective or a style of thought” based on the idea of the “na-
tion.” See Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 1; Eric
J. Hobsbawn, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (New York: Cambridge
84
Nationalism, Ethnic Pressures, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union
University Press, 1990), p. 9; Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origins and Back-
ground (New York: Macmillan, 1944), p. 10; and Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Moder-
nity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 3. On deªnitions of nationalism, see Astrid
S. Tuminez, Russian Nationalism Since 1856: Ideology and the Making of Foreign Policy (Boulder:
Rowman & Littleªeld, 2000), ch. 1, esp. pp. 1–12.
7. An ideology is a set of ideas, beliefs, and concepts (invented, factual, or normative) that purport to
explain or justify a speciªc social order. If that order does not exist, the ideology “may constitute a be-
lieved strategy for its attainment.” This deªnition derives in part from Eric Carlton, War and Ideology
(London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 18–21.
8. Nationalist ideologies always include a national mission—the highest good for which members of
the nation must strive and sacriªce. The particular nationalist mission relevant to this article is sepa-
ratism, or the dismemberment of an existing state in order to create a new state or several new states.
9. See Rogers Brubaker, “Rethinking Nationhood: Nation as Institutionalized Form, Practical Cate-
gory, Contingent Event,” Contention, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Fall 1994), pp. 3–19; Katherine Verdery,
“Whither ‘Nation’ and ‘Nationalism?’” Daedalus, Vol.122, No. 3 (Summer 1993), pp. 37–46; and
Craig Calhoun, “Nationalism and Ethnicity,” Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 19 (1993),
pp. 222–224. On the issue of the “people” as the repository of political power, see Greenfeld, Nation-
alism; and Kohn, Idea of Nationalism. A more common deªnition of nation is a “group of people who
believe that they are ancestrally related.” See Walker Connor, Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Under-
standing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. xi, 75; and Robert J. Kaiser, The Geog-
raphy of Nationalism in Russia and the USSR (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 6.
10. Brubaker, “Rethinking Nationhood,” pp. 3, 6.
85
Tuminez
86
Nationalism, Ethnic Pressures, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union
15. Mark N. Katz, “Collapsed Empires,” in Chester A. Crocker and Fen Osler Hampson, eds., Man-
aging Global Chaos: Sources of and Responses to International Conºict (Washington: U.S. Institute of
Peace, 1996), pp. 26–28. For examples of imperial powers’ collaboration or alliance with select elites
in the periphery, see Percival Spear, India: A Modern History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1961); Bernal Diaz, The Conquest of New Spain, trans. by J. M. Cohen (Baltimore: Penguin Books,
1963); Motyl, Imperial Ends; and Nahaylo and Swoboda, Soviet Disunion, chs. 2–6.
16. Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1952), pp. 56–60.
17. Ibid., p. 57, 94–99. On this important point, see also Reinhard Bendix, Kings or People: Power and
the Mandate to Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 582–604. My thanks to Mark
Kramer for these references.
18. The relationship of control between center and periphery is present in all deªnitions of empire.
For deªnitions other than the one I use, see Michael W. Doyle, Empires (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1986), pp. 19–20; David A. Lake, “The Rise, Fall and Future of the Russian Empire,” in
Dawisha and Parrott, eds., End of Empire? pp. 32–36; and Tilly, “How Empires End,” pp. 3–4.
19. Mark R. Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State (New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2002).
87
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periods has carried a stigma and in other periods has not. Normative implica-
tions aside, however, there are several reasons for arguing that the Soviet
Union was in fact an empire. First, the USSR had a controlling center and a
controlled periphery. The center was Moscow, and the central rulers were
(primarily, though not exclusively) the Russian and Russiªed elites who
wielded power in key Soviet institutions. The periphery was the rest of the
country, especially the republics outside Russia. Second, although Russians
did not always beneªt from policies implemented by the center—and at
times, especially under Josif Stalin, they were treated brutally (as were other
ethnic groups)—the Russians nonetheless constituted a society that, in many
measurable (though not absolute) ways, dominated over other ethnic groups.
Russian culture and Russian language were most salient in the USSR; the au-
thorities treated expressions of Russian chauvinism or ethnic assertiveness
with greater leniency than they did similar expressions by other ethnic groups;
and ethnic Russians occupied the bulk of senior appointments in pivotal in-
stitutions of authority.20 Third, the Soviet Union was organized along na-
tional-territorial lines, thereby maintaining and emphasizing the distinct cul-
tural, linguistic, and territorial heritage and features of Russian and major
non-Russian populations.21 This administrative structure helped to sustain
the division between center and periphery, and it reinforced the imperial or-
ganization of the state.
20. See, for example, Lowell Tillett, The Great Friendship: Soviet Historians on the Non-Russian Nation-
alities (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969); Brian D. Taylor, “Red Army Blues:
The Future of Military Power in the Former Soviet Union,” Breakthroughs, No. 2 (Spring 1992),
pp. 1–8; and Simon Dixon, “The Russians: The Dominant Nationality,” in Graham Smith, ed., The
Nationalities Question in the Soviet Union (New York: Longman Publishing Group, 1990), pp. 21–39.
Philip G. Roeder discusses the mixed nature of Russian dominance in the Soviet Union in “Soviet
Federalism and Ethnic Mobilization,” World Politics, Vol. 43, No. 1 (January 1991), pp. 196–232.
21. My use of the term “major” does not necessarily imply that these were the largest ethnic groups. In
a few cases the titular ethnic groups of the USSR’s fourteen non-Russian republics were smaller than
certain ethnic groups that did not have their own republics. There were, for example, far more Tatars
than Lithuanians, Estonians, or Latvians, but the Tatars did not have their own union republic,
whereas each of the Baltic nations did.
22. Quoted in S. V. Cheshko, Raspad Sovetskogo Soyuza: Etnopoliticheskii analiz (Moscow: Rossiiskaya
Akademiya Nauk, 1996), p. 65.
88
Nationalism, Ethnic Pressures, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union
89
Tuminez
25. See Desyatyi s”ezd Rossiiskoi Kommunisticheskoi Partii. Stenograªcheskii otchet (Moscow:
Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1921), p. 101.
26. Fowkes, Disintegration of the Soviet Union, pp. 47–61; and Nahaylo and Swoboda, Soviet Disunion,
pp. 64–66.
27. Those who failed to suppress ethnic nationalism were punished. In 1972, for example, Ukrainian
Communist Party First Secretary Petro Shelest was removed from his position because he tolerated
manifestations of ethnic Ukrainian nationalism. See “Dnevnik P. E. Shelesta,” in Rossiiskii
Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’no-Politicheskoi Istorii, Fond (F.) 666, Delo (D.) 2, Listy (Ll.)
333–48 (I am grateful to Mark Kramer for this citation); Shelest’s interview in Argumenty i fakty, No. 2
(January 1989), p. 14; and Nahaylo and Swoboda, Soviet Disunion, pp. 177–179. See also Ronald
Suny, “State, Civil Society, and Ethnic Cultural Consolidation in the USSR—Roots of the National
Question,” in Gail Lapidus et al., eds. From Union to Commonwealth: Nationalism and Separatism in
the Soviet Republics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 43 n. 12. Longevity in
ofªce—in some cases for more than twenty-ªve years—was especially evident among ªrst secretaries
in the Central Asian republics, Georgia, Moldova, Belarus, and the Baltic states.
90
Nationalism, Ethnic Pressures, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union
power. This was particularly true under Brezhnev when, at one point, as many
as six non-Russians sat on the Politburo. In the Central Committee of the
Soviet Communist Party (CPSU), Ukrainians and Kazakhs established a
signiªcant presence. The powers and privileges given to elites in the periphery
cemented linkages needed for imperial rule. These linkages were particularly
important in relations between the central leadership and the USSR’s four-
teen non-Russian union republics.28 A Soviet-wide elite emerged, consisting
of Russians and co-opted non-Russians in the periphery.
A second component of the center-periphery compact was the economic
modernization of the outlying republics. This push for modernization created
many opportunities for upward mobility among economic, political, social,
and intellectual elites. National and ethnic groups within the USSR (Russian
and non-Russian alike) paid an enormous price for the Soviet policies of
forced collectivization and crash industrialization, but these policies did lead
over time to higher standards of living in the periphery.
The Soviet government transformed the social landscape of the former
Russian empire through education, industrialization, and urbanization.
Whereas four out of ªve people in Tsarist Russia were illiterate, literacy rates
in the Soviet Union (in at least two languages, for many) became high by
world standards. Opportunities for higher education also expanded greatly,
and titular nationalities beneªted from quota systems that gave them privi-
leged access to higher education and, subsequently, to white-collar jobs and
administrative and leadership posts. This process resulted in the concentra-
tion of non-Russian elites in urban industrialized areas and contributed to the
consolidation of national identity in Georgia, Armenia, Lithuania, and other
republics. Such consolidation, however, did not produce attacks against the
center during the years when the center was cohesive and the threat of force
was credible. Indigenous elites who beneªted from opportunities for political,
social, and intellectual mobility opted instead to be loyal to the Soviet system
and cooperated with the center to suppress dissident nationalism whenever it
emerged.29
28. Steven Burg, “Nationality Elites and Political Change in the Soviet Union,” in Lubomyr Hajda
and Mark Beissinger, eds., The Nationalities Factor in Soviet Politics and Society (Boulder: Westview
Press, 1990), pp. 25–26; and Roman Laba, “How Yeltsin’s Exploitation of Ethnic Nationalism
Brought Down an Empire,” Transition, Vol. 2, No. 1 (12 January 1996), p. 9. Peripheral elites’ de-
pendence on the center for their privileges and powers is a central theme in Roeder, “Soviet Federal-
ism.” For an account of the extensive corruption in Uzbekistan and the way it was tolerated by the
central authorities, see Telman Gdlyan and Nikolai Ivanov, Kremlevskoe delo (Moscow: Gramota,
1996).
29. Zvi Gitelman, “Development and Ethnicity in the Soviet Union,” in Alexander J. Motyl, ed., The
Post-Soviet Nations: Perspectives on the Demise of the USSR (New York: Columbia University Press,
1992), p. 228; Zaslavsky, “The Soviet Union,” p. 86; Fowkes, Disintegration of the Soviet Union,
pp. 79–82, 100–104; Seweryn Bialer, Stalin’s Successors: Leadership, Stability and Change in the Soviet
91
Tuminez
The Soviet regime also implemented economic policies favoring the pe-
riphery. Underdeveloped republics in Central Asia received a “larger than pro-
portional share of investment resources” and direct subsidies from the cen-
ter.30 To help stabilize nationality relations, Moscow undertook comprehen-
sive regional development projects and provided supplementary ªnancing to
poorer regions and areas with harsh climates. Statistical data from 1961 to
1985 reºect the overall improvement of economic well-being in the periphery
as a result of these policies. National income and industrial production grew
consistently during the 25-year period, although rates of growth were higher
in 1961–1970 than in 1971–1985. Per-capita consumption also rose almost
consistently during the two-and-a-half decades, leading one economist to
conclude that, despite uneven rates, living standards as a whole “improved
markedly in all republics” from 1961 to 1985. 31
Along with the credible threat of force, the compact between center and
periphery helped forge Soviet imperial cohesion. Many elites favored the
maintenance of the Soviet Union, and the populations in outlying republics
could see steady (if slow) material improvements in their lives. At the same
time, a consensus in the center, among Russians and Russiªed Slavs who sup-
ported Russian hegemony, also helped maintain the Soviet order. This con-
sensus was sufªciently strong in the late 1970s and early 1980s to preclude
any Russian support for separatism in the periphery or for any steps that
would weaken the integrity of the Soviet state. Most Russians viewed the en-
tire Soviet Union as their homeland. For example, in the late 1980s when the
Institute of Ethnology in Moscow polled Russians in the Russian Federation
on what they considered their motherland (rodina), 70 percent responded
“the Soviet Union.” 32
Union (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 214–216; and Roeder, “Soviet Federal-
ism,” pp. 196–232.
30. Gertrude Schroeder, “Nationalities and the Soviet Economy,” in Hajda and Beissinger, eds., Na-
tionalities Factor, p. 50. See also Richard E. Ericson, “Soviet Economic Structure and the National Ques-
tion,” in Motyl, Post-Soviet Nations, p. 250; Jonathan F. Schiffer, Soviet Regional Economic Policy: The
East-West Debate over Paciªc Siberian Development (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1989); and David A.
Dyker, The Process of Investment in the Soviet Union (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
31. Schroeder, “Nationalities and the Soviet Economy,” p. 50; for statistics on income, industrial pro-
duction, and per capita consumption from 1961 to 1985, see pp. 45–51.
32. In Tallinn, Estonia, a comparatively lower percentage of Russians (53 percent) claimed the Soviet
Union as their motherland. See Leokadia Drobyzheva, “Perestroika and the Ethnic Consciousness of
Russians,” in Lapidus et al., eds., From Union to Commonwealth, pp. 101, 112 n. 8.
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Nationalism, Ethnic Pressures, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union
identities among many groups. This process contradicted the ideal of Com-
munist proletarian solidarity, which was at the core of Bolshevik ideology.
Shortly after coming to power in 1917, the Bolsheviks realized that any plan
to save the “October Revolution” by reconstituting the great expanse of the
Tsarist Russian empire would require concessions to national groups that had
been independent to one extent or another from 1917 to 1921. Lenin himself
expressed sympathy for ethnic and national groups that, in his view, had suf-
fered under the hand of Russian national chauvinism during Tsarist rule and
were thus justiªably wary of rejoining a state that resembled the former em-
pire. He and his followers had long insisted that nationalism would eventually
disappear as socialism itself developed. 33
In developing a political and legal framework for the new Bolshevik state,
Stalin ªrst proposed a federation with autonomy—but not sovereignty—for
constituent parts of the state, with control centralized in the Russian Soviet
Federated Socialist Republic. Lenin opposed this, however, and Stalin revised
his plan to respond better to the sensitivities of the non-Russian nationalities.
In 1922 the Russian Republic, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Transcaucasus Re-
public signed the Union Treaty that created the Soviet Union. Two years later,
in 1924, a Soviet Constitution was adopted, declaring the USSR an “integral,
federal, multinational state formed on the principle of socialist federalism as a
result of the free self-determination of nations.” 34 Fifteen union republics
eventually constituted the federation, each organized along ethnoterritorial
lines—that is, each republic had a titular nationality representing the repub-
lic’s dominant ethnic group, which then received nominal control over the re-
public’s territory. To reinforce self-determination, the Soviet constitution also
granted the ªfteen republics the right to secede from the union, a right that
meant more on paper than in practice.
The legal framework of the Soviet Union, along with korenizatsiya, vali-
dated and reinforced the idea of nations and their legitimacy as bases for state
administration and organization. This was evident not only at the union-
republic level, but at all levels of state administration in the early Soviet years.
The result was what might be called “ethnic afªrmative action run amuck”
from 1918 through the 1920s. Nearly all nationalities, differentiated mainly
by language, established their own administrative and territorial units. From
33. Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic
Particularism,” Slavic Review, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Summer 1994), p. 425; Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, De-
cline of an Empire: The Soviet Socialist Republics, trans. by Martin Sokolinsky and Henry A. LaFarge
(New York: Harper and Row, 1979), pp. 13–46; and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “The Right of Nations to
Self-determination,” in Omar Dahbour and Micheline R. Ishay, eds., The Nationalism Reader (Atlan-
tic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1995), pp. 208–214.
34. “The Constitution of the USSR,” in Martha B. Olcott, ed., The Soviet Multinational State: Read-
ings and Documents (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1990), p. 8.
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Tuminez
1918 to 1922, for example, Stalin, who was then Soviet commissar for na-
tionalities, brought into being the self-governing republics and administra-
tions of Bashkiriya, Tatarstan, Kirgiziya, Dagestan, Kareliya, and Yakutiya. By
the late 1920s, union republics contained national okrugs, national raions, na-
tional soviets, native executive committees, native soviets, village (aul) soviets,
clan soviets, and nomadic soviets. In addition, the regime encouraged the de-
velopment of distinct written languages for all ethnic groups, even when this
did not seem entirely rational or efªcient, as with groups that previously had
not used a written language.35 By 1928, newspapers were being published in
at least forty-seven languages (increasing to ªfty-nine by 1933 and sixty-six by
1938) and books in sixty-six languages. The regime also required ofªcial busi-
ness and education to be conducted in the languages of the various ethnic
communities. National consolidation accelerated when Soviet leaders en-
dorsed and supported the cultural development of ethnic groups through in-
digenous libraries, literary organizations, theaters, academies, and associa-
tions. The Communist Party established ethnic quotas at all levels of
administration, creating an “exuberant national carnival” in which Ukraine,
for example, had Russian, German, Polish, Jewish, Moldovan, Chechen, Bul-
garian, Greek, Belarusan, and Albanian soviets.36
Under Stalin, and especially in the 1930s, Soviet policy shifted from
widespread cultivation of ethnic and national culture and administration to
the forcible suppression of non-Russian or “bourgeois” nationalism. Although
the regime continued to support the use of multiple languages, it began to
combat the nationalism of smaller nations and openly promoted Russian na-
tionalist ideas. Stalin ordered the systematic removal of local ethnic Commu-
nist leaders, cultural luminaries, and literary ªgures. These purges decimated
local elites not only in union republics such as Azerbaijan and Ukraine but
also in non-union republics including the Crimean and Tatar autonomous re-
publics.37 The promotion of Russian nationalism was consistent with Stalin’s
inclinations toward Russian chauvinism from the earliest years after he be-
came the top Soviet leader.38 When the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Re-
35. In Central Asia and Azerbaijan, for example, where people communicated mainly in Turkish
(Turki) for business, the Soviet regime accentuated the differences in extant languages and encouraged
the development of separate Uzbek, Turkmen, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Azerbaijani languages. See Isaac
Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography, 2nd Ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), p. 211;
Fowkes, Disintegration of the Soviet Union, pp. 55–59; and Suny, “State, Civil Society,” p. 29.
36. Slezkine, “USSR as a Communal Apartment,” pp. 426–439; Fowkes, Disintegration of the Soviet
Union, pp. 35–52; Terry Martin, The Afªrmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet
Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), chs. 2–6; and Cheshko, Raspad
Sovetskogo Soyuza, pp. 142–165.
37. Fowkes, Disintegration of the Soviet Union, pp. 47–61; and Nahaylo and Swoboda, Soviet Disunion,
pp. 64–80.
38. In 1921 Stalin exhorted his fellow Georgians to ªght against local nationalism in favor of union
94
Nationalism, Ethnic Pressures, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union
public (RSFSR) adopted its new constitution (modeled on the Soviet consti-
tution) in 1937, a Pravda editorial rhapsodized:
Russian culture enriches the culture of other peoples. The Russian language has
become the language of world revolution. Lenin wrote in Russian. Stalin writes
in Russian. Russian culture has become international, for it is the most ad-
vanced, the most humane. Leninism is its offspring, the Stalin constitution its
expression.39
with great Russia. In his 1924 speech proclaiming “socialism in one country,” he excoriated Trotsky
and others for their insufªcient faith in the Russian proletariat. During the period of New Economic
Policy he also acknowledged and tacitly supported the nationalism of those Russian elites who had
joined the party as a means of restoring great Russia. See Deutscher, Stalin, pp. 238–244, 489–490.
39. Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928–1941 (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1990), p. 568.
40. Slezkine, “USSR as a Communal Apartment,” pp. 442 and 445. See also Cheshko, Raspad
Sovetskogo Soyuza, pp. 156–65; and Suny, “State, Civil Society,” pp. 22–43. The cooling of Soviet en-
thusiasm for ethnic development is reºected in the declining number of peoples registered as
“ethnoses” in the Soviet Union: from 194 in 1926 to 101 in 1979. Among the ethnic groups that were
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amalgamated into larger ones were the Yomuds, Tekinsks, Goklens, and others who became the
Turkmen nation, and Altai-Kizhi, Telengits, Teleuts, and others who were encompassed by the Altai
people. See Yu. V. Bromlei, “Etnicheskie protsessy v SSSR,” Kommunist (Moscow), No. 5 (February
1983), pp. 56–65.
41. As Slezkine argues, Soviet policy created tension in “the coexistence of republican statehood and
passport nationality. The former assumed that territorial states made nations, the latter suggested that
primordial nations might be entitled to their own states. The former presupposed that all residents of
Belorusssia would (and should) some day become Belorussian, the latter provided the non-
Belorusssian residents with arguments against it. The Soviet government endorsed both deªnitions
without ever attempting to construct an ethnically meaningful Soviet nation or turn the USSR into a
Russian nation-state, so that when the non-national Soviet state had lost its Soviet meaning, the na-
tional non-states were the only possible heirs.” Cited from Slezkine, “USSR as a Communal Apart-
ment,” p. 451. On problems and resistance that the regime encountered in attempting to create a su-
pranational “Soviet” identity, see Nahaylo and Swobodnik, Soviet Disunion, pp. 174–198.
96
Nationalism, Ethnic Pressures, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union
union republics of the USSR. In late 1982 the newly appointed head of the
CPSU, Yurii Andropov, reafªrmed Lenin’s approach:
What is the essence of the path established by Lenin? Brieºy, it could be put this
way—it is the fully voluntary union of free peoples as the guarantee of maxi-
mum durability of the federation. . . . It is the full equality of all nations and na-
tional groups, and the concomitant attempt to liquidate inequality among
them, not only legally but in fact. It is the free development of every republic,
every national group. 42
42. Yu. V. Andropov, “Sixty Years of the USSR,” in Olcott, ed., Soviet Multinational State, p. 13.
43. For an excellent account of the famine, drawing on newly released archival evidence, see Nicolas
Werth, “The Great Famine,” in Stéphane Courtois, ed., The Black Book of Communism, trans.
by Mark Kramer and Jonathan Murphy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999),
pp. 159–168.
44. See the detailed accounts in Nicolas Werth, “The Other Side of Victory,” in Courtois, ed., The
Black Book of Communism, pp. 216–231; J. Otto Pohl, Ethnic Cleansing in the USSR, 1937–1949
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999); and Svetlana Alieva, ed., Tak eto bylo: Natsional’nye repressii v
SSSR 1919–1952 gody, 3 Vols. (Moscow: Insan, 1993), esp. Vols. 2–3.
97
Tuminez
rights advocates, used the issue of deported peoples to delegitimize the Soviet
regime.45
Among Russians, numerous political leaders, members of the intelligen-
tsia, and ordinary people died in the Stalinist repressions, which wiped out
millions of people. Toward the eve of World War II Stalin slaughtered as
many as 40,000 Red Army ofªcers, the majority of them Russians. Because
Russians were not exempted from the horrors of Stalinism, many of them
subsequently objected to the equation of the Soviet regime with Russia. Dur-
ing the Gorbachev era, some Russians began to voice demands for independ-
ence from the Soviet Union.46
After Stalin died, Soviet policy toward nationalities returned to a more
even-handed, but still unequal, basis. Although korenizatsiya and informal
quotas (e.g., a certain number of seats in the Politburo were reserved
for the Ukrainian party ªrst secretary, for the ªrst secretary from one of
the Baltic states, for the ªrst secretary from one of the Caucasus states, and
for the ªrst secretary from one of the Central Asian states) devolved some
power to elites in the periphery and helped cultivate their loyalty to the
center, power in the most important union institutions remained concen-
trated in the hands of Russians and Russiªed Slavs. This was true of the Com-
munist Party, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet,47 the various ministries
and state committees, and the armed forces and security apparatus.48 Many
of the legal rights accorded to the republics, notably the right to secede, be-
came but a meaningless provision on paper. In essence, the Soviet Union
functioned more like an imperial hierarchy than a federation of equals. The
three Baltic states—Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania—were incorporated into
45. See, for example, Aleksandr M. Nekrich, The Punished Peoples: The Deportation and Fate of Soviet
Minorities at the End of the Second World War (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1978),
pp. 181–191; and Edward J. Lazzerini, “Crimean Tatars,” in Smith, ed., Nationalities Question,
pp. 322–338. For decades, the Crimean Tatars engaged in peaceful demonstrations and mass petition-
ing of Moscow ofªcials to allow them to return to their traditional homeland.
46. One Russian scholar rejects the term “ethnocide” to depict what happened in the 1920s and
1930s. Because Russians themselves were repressed and killed, he prefers to use the term “civil war” to
describe the state’s wanton destruction of any and all who might oppose it. See Cheshko, Raspad
Sovetskogo Soyuza, p. 106. See also Nahaylo and Swoboda, Soviet Disunion, p. 74.
47. In the Supreme Soviet itself, a body with largely symbolic powers, non-Russians and non-Slavs
were more than adequately represented. In 1970 they comprised 26.1 percent of the population of the
Soviet Union but held 40.3 percent of seats in the Supreme Soviet. See Carrère d’Encausse, Decline of
an Empire, p. 125.
48. In the late 1970s Russians accounted for 61.37 percent of the Soviet ofªcer corps, and Ukrainians
for 26.25 percent. See U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, Ethnic Composition of the Soviet Ofªcer Corps,
DIA–7900037, Washington DC, 1979, p. 3; report authored by Allen Hetmanek, Bruce Thompson,
and Richard Trout. For an analysis that minimizes the Russians’ political comparative advantage,
claiming that Russian representation in the CPSU exceeded their ratio in the population as a whole by
only 8 percent, see Cheshko, Raspad Sovetskogo Soyuza, p. 115. This might be true of Communist
Party membership overall, but certainly not of the party leadership.
98
Nationalism, Ethnic Pressures, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union
the union via the Nazi-Soviet Pact, but the populations in those republics
(and, to a lesser extent, in other republics such as Moldova, Azerbaijan, and
western Ukraine) never fully accepted their status as constituent units of the
USSR.
The Soviet policy of suppressing historical memory in the Baltic states
meant that the incorporation of those republics into the Soviet Union was a
taboo subject. When Gorbachev ªnally allowed public discussion of this piece
of history, Baltic separatist nationalism intensiªed as a result. Disregard for
history also accounted for such measures as Khrushchev’s transfer of the Cri-
mean peninsula—an area tightly linked to Russian history and collective
memory of Russian heroism and greatness—from the Russian Federation to
Ukraine in 1954, a gesture that at the time (when republic borders were of lit-
tle import) seemed largely inconsequential. Similarly, Soviet authorities took
industrial territories that were populated predominantly by Russians and in-
corporated them into the Kazakh Republic, formed in 1936. During the
Gorbachev era, Russian nationalists referred to Sevastopol and the northern
territories of Kazakhstan to discredit the Soviet state on the grounds that it
did not serve Russian interests.49
Rampant negligence and exploitation also marked Soviet policies in the
ecological sphere, giving rise to anti-Soviet sentiments and movements. Many
citizens in the periphery blamed the Soviet Union for such disasters as the
pollution of Lake Baikal, the drying and shrinking of the Aral Sea (which
caused the deaths of many in Karakalpak and continues to jeopardize the lives
and livelihoods of about four million people), and the catastrophic accident at
the Chornobyl nuclear plant that claimed many lives and contaminated large
portions of western Ukraine and Belarus. In Russia, Soviet plans to divert
rivers from north to south to irrigate the arid southern regions of the RSFSR
became a focal point for Russian anti-Soviet nationalism and the discrediting
of the Soviet system.50 Economic subsidization of the periphery at the expense
of the Russian republic was yet another “unfair” policy cited by many
Russians when demanding separation from the union. Finally, repressive poli-
cies in the religious sphere—policies that intensiªed under Khrushchev—
cultivated anti-Soviet sentiments among such groups as the Uniates (Byzan-
49. See, for example, “Rossiiskii parlament usilivaet davlenie na Ukrainu,” Nezavisimaya gazeta (Mos-
cow), 23 May 1992, p. 1.
50. Valery Tishkov, “The Soviet Empire Before and After Perestroika,” in Rudolph and Good, eds.,
Nationalism and Empire, p. 204; and Nicolai N. Petro, “‘The Project of the Century’: A Case Study of
Russian National Dissent,” Studies in Comparative Communism, Vol. 22 (Autumn/Winter 1987),
pp. 235–252. Central Asian republics, which stood to beneªt from the river-diversion project and
which received subsidies from the center, tended to favor Soviet policies as a whole. Not surprisingly,
these republics did not wish to secede from the USSR and were opposed to the breakup of the Soviet
state.
99
Tuminez
51. Although Khrushchev stepped up the intensity of anti-religious campaigns and atheistic propa-
ganda in the USSR, the Soviet regime never uniformly implemented an anti-religious policy. Instead,
it co-opted religious institutions and leaders where possible and persecuted mainly those whose reli-
gious beliefs were closely tied to anti-Soviet nationalist feelings. See Bohdan R. Bociurkiw, “National-
ities and Soviet Religious Policies,” in Hajda and Beissinger, eds., Nationalities Factor, pp. 148–174.
On Russian Orthodox dissent in the USSR, see Jane Ellis, The Russian Orthodox Church: A Contempo-
rary History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).
52. A vast amount of documentary evidence about the armed uprisings in western Ukraine, western
Belarus, and the Baltic states is now available in the archives of those former Soviet republics. Special-
ists in the Baltic states and Ukraine have published many collections of declassiªed documents and
lengthy accounts of the uprisings. Of particular importance in Ukraine have been documents pub-
lished in the semi-annual journal Z arkhiviv VUChK, HPU, NKVD, KHB, put out by the Instytut
Istorii Ukrainy. For a comparison of the nationalist resistance movements in Ukraine with those in
western Belarus and the Baltic states, see Anatolii Rusnachenko, Narod zburenyi: Natsional’no
vyzvol’nyi rukh v Ukraini i natsional’ni rukhy oporu v Bilorusii, Lytvi, Latvii, Estonii u 1940–50-kh
rokakh (Kyiv: Universytets’ke vyd-vo Pulsary, 2002). I am grateful to Mark Kramer for alerting me to
these sources and for providing copies of thousands of pages of photocopied documents he obtained
from the Ukrainian, Baltic, and Russian archives.
100
Nationalism, Ethnic Pressures, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union
53. See Fowkes, Disintegration of the Soviet Union, ch. 4, on the varieties of national resistance in the
Soviet Union.
54. For further documentation of ethnic unrest in the pre-Gorbachev era, see “Ne dopustim kritiki
Stalina,” Istochnik (Moscow), No. 6 (1995), pp. 41–43 (my thanks to Mark Kramer for this source
and the next one); “Dokladnaya zapiska. O raskrytii antisovetskikh proyavlenii, imevshikh mesto v g.
Vilnyuse,” 11 June 1966, in Lietuvos Ypatingasis Archyvas (LYA), Fondas (F.) K-1, Apyrasas (Ap.) 3,
Byla (B.) 51, Lapai (La.) 1–3; Nahaylo and Swoboda, Soviet Disunion; Fowkes, Disintegration of the
Soviet Union; and Elizabeth Fuller, “Georgia, Stalin, and the Demonstrations of 1956,” Radio Liberty
Report 190/86, 3 May 1988.
55. Nahaylo and Swoboda, Soviet Disunion, pp. 110–220; and the chapters on Estonians, Latvians,
Lithuanians, and Ukrainians in Smith, ed., Nationalities Question, pp. 40–108.
101
Table 1: Mass Ethnic Disturbances in the Soviet Union, 1957–1986 (Partial List)
102
Citizens carrying Stalin portraits an- Police use force; 6 held for criminal
Tuminez
103
1981 North Ossetia; 4500 26 held under criminal charges
funeral of a murdered driver
Fight between Tajiks and non-titular
1985 Dushanbe, Tajikistan; 700 nationality at a movie theatre; Tajiks 5 held under criminal charges
beat up ethnic Russians at the theatre
Source: “O massovykh besporyadkakh s 1957 goda.” This highly classiªed document, compiled by KGB Chairman Viktor Chebrikov at Gorbachev’s request, was declassiªed in 1995
and published in Istochnik (Moscow), No. 6 (1995), pp. 146–153. I am grateful to Mark Kramer for providing me with this document.
Nationalism, Ethnic Pressures, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union
Tuminez
the mid-1950s through the mid-1980s was minimal and did not threaten the
viability of the USSR.
56. In the Austro-Hungarian empire, reforms that culminated in the abolition of serfdom reinforced
the nationalism of peasant nations directed against the imperial center. See John-Paul Himka, “Na-
tionality Problems in the Habsburg Monarchy and the Soviet Union: The Perspective of History,” in
Rudolph and Good, eds., Nationalism and Empire, pp. 80–84.
57. For overviews of Baltic history and the ªrst years of Gorbachev’s rule, see Romuald Misiunas and
Rein Taagepera, The Baltic States: Years of Dependence, 1940–1990, Rev. and Exp. Ed. (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1993); Riina Kionka, “Estonians,” in Smith, ed., Nationalities Question,
pp. 40–94; and R. Kh. Simonyan, “Strany Baltii v gody Gorbachevskoi perestroiki,” Novaya i
noveishaya istoriya (Moscow), No. 2 (March–April 2003), pp. 44–65. Besides the Baltic states and
other union republics, some autonomous republics also declared sovereignty by the latter half of 1990.
These included Komi, Kareliya, Tatarstan, Udmurtiya, Yakutiya, Bashkiriya, Mari El, and Buryatiya
in Russia, Transnistria in Moldova, and South Ossetia in Georgia.
58. Moldova, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, and Belarus all declared independence in
the latter half of 1991, following the aborted coup in August.
104
Nationalism, Ethnic Pressures, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union
Separatist Nationalism
59. Alfred Erich Senn, Gorbachev’s Failure in Lithuania (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995).
60. See TsK KPSS, “Predlozhenie Tsentral’nogo Komiteta Kompartii Litvy Plenumu TsK KPSS ‘O
sovershenstvovanii mezhnatsional’nykh otnoshenii v SSSR,’” 5 January 1989, in Lietuvos Visuomene.s
Organizacijú Archyvas (LVOA), F. 1771, Ap. 272, B. 153, Ll. 1–21 (my thanks to Mark Kramer for
giving me a copy of this document).
105
Tuminez
61. Dzintra Bungs, “Latvia,” RFE/RL Report on the USSR, Vol. 1, No. 52 (29 December 1989), p. 27.
I have documented the conºict between Moscow and the Baltic republics over the Nazi-Soviet Pact in
Astrid S. Tuminez, “Soviet Politics in Transition: Two Case Studies,” manuscript, Massachusetts Insti-
tute of Technology, 1990.
62. See, for example, Tsentral’nyi Komitet KPSS, “O gosudarstvennoi i natsional’noi simvolike
Latviiskoi SSR,” 2 August 1988, pp. 1–4, in Latvijas Valsts Arhivs (LVA), (Fonds) (F.) 101, Apridos
(Apr.) 61, Lietas (Lie.) 117, Ll. 26–29; TsK KPSS, “Informatsiya o vypolnenii postanovleniya TsK
KPSS ‘O merakh po dal’neishemu sovershenstvovaniyu deyatel’nosti Vserossiiskogo obshchestva
okhrany pamyatnikov istorii i kul’tury,’” 31 May 1989, in LVOA, F. 1771, Ap. 272, B. 153; TsK KP
Litvy, “O planakh administratsii SShA i zarubezhnykh natstsentrov ispol’zovat’ 16 fevralya v
antisovetskikh kampaniyakh,” 18 January 1988, in LYA, F. K-1, Ap. 49, B. 273, La. 4–6, 15–16; and
“Otvety ‘G’ na voprosy organov KGB,” n.d., in LYA, F. K-1, Ap. 49, B. 281, La. 2–6. My thanks to
Mark Kramer for giving me copies of all these documents.
106
Nationalism, Ethnic Pressures, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union
63. Mark Kramer’s article “The Collapse of East European Communism and the Repercussions
within the Soviet Union (Part 1),” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 5, No. 4 (Fall 2003), pp. 178–256,
convincingly shows that the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe had an important effect on
Gorbachev’s policy vis-à-vis the Baltic states.
64. Tuminez, “Soviet Politics in Transition”; and Gorbachev Foundation, Soyuz mozhno bylo sokhranit’:
Dokumenty i fakty o politike M. S. Gorbacheva po reformirovaniyu i sokhraneniyu mnogonatsional’nogo
gosudarstva (Moscow: Aprel’-85, 1995), p. 98.
65. In the March 1989 elections to the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies, leaders of nationalist
movements won 36 out of 42 seats in Lithuania, 24 of 29 seats in Latvia, and 26 of 30 seats in Estonia.
See Lyudmila Alekseeva, Nyeformaly: Civil Society in the USSR (New York: Helsinki Watch Commit-
tee, 1990), p. 105.
107
Tuminez
tionalists in the March 1989 elections for the USSR Congress of People’s
Deputies, Latvian Party First Secretary Alfred Rubiks wrote a pithy document
to the Politburo outlining the Communist Party’s loss of control and author-
ity in his republic, the inªltration of Latvian nationalists into the party hierar-
chy, and the rise of the Latvian National Front as a real alternative to the
Communist Party.66 Nonetheless, despite Rubiks’s pleas and warnings, Mos-
cow did not take any decisive measures to halt Baltic nationalism.
Ultimately, the central authorities did resort to coercive measures against
the Baltic states.67 In April 1990 Moscow turned off oil and gas pipelines to
Lithuania, and Vilnius retaliated by blocking natural gas transfers to the Rus-
sian exclave of Kaliningrad. In May 1990, Lithuanian leaders sought to ward
off Moscow’s onslaught by offering to suspend the recently adopted laws on
independence. But they made clear that they would not suspend the declara-
tion of independence itself. In June, Lithuania further agreed to a moratorium
on its declaration of independence, and Moscow ended its economic block-
ade, bringing to an end the ªrst standoff.
During a second standoff in Lithuania between Baltic nationalists and
union supporters in January 1991, the Soviet regime sought to make a stron-
ger show of resolve. Soviet riot troops and KGB forces stormed several build-
ings in Vilnius to remove the elected government of Vytautas Landsbergis (the
leader of Sájudis) and to install the so-called Lithuanian National Salvation
Committee, an entity created by the KGB to reassert control of the republic.
Fourteen people were killed, prompting worldwide condemnation, including
a strong protest from the United States and a threat to cancel a summit and
U.S. aid to the Soviet Union. Days later Soviet riot troops and KGB units in
Latvia attacked the republic’s Ministry of Internal Affairs headquarters, killing
ªve people. Despite these initial thrusts, Gorbachev declined to follow
through on plans to impose full states of emergency in Lithuania and Latvia
and to dissolve the local governments in those republics.
Although force was used in January 1991, there was no indication of con-
sensus, resolve, or ªrm leadership at the center on this matter.68 The use of
66. Byuro TsK Kompartii Latvii, “Politbyuro TsK KPSS ot chlena TsK Kompartii Latvii Rubiksa
Alfreda Petrovicha,” 12 October 1989, in LVA, F. 101, Ap. 63, Lie. 17, Lapa (La.) 105–108. By Janu-
ary 1991 Rubiks and his colleagues in the Latvian Central Committee indicated their readiness for
Moscow to impose martial law in their republic. See “Postanovlenie X Plenuma Tsentral’nogo
Komiteta Kompartii Latvii,” 13 January 1991, in LVA, F. 101. Ap. 67, Lie. 1, La. 9–10. My thanks
again to Mark Kramer for providing copies of these documents.
67. Gorbachev has consistently denied that he ordered the use of force in Lithuania and Latvia in Jan-
uary 1991, but, as Brian Taylor shows, there is ample reason to be skeptical about these denials. See
Brian Taylor, “The Soviet Military and the Disintegration of the USSR,” Journal of Cold War Studies,
Vol. 5, No. 1 (Winter 2003), pp. 40–42. For Gorbachev’s denials, see Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs
(New York: Doubleday, 1996), pp. 575–581.
68. In another show of force in May 1991—when MVD troops took down unsanctioned customs
108
Nationalism, Ethnic Pressures, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union
force in Latvia and Lithuania appeared half-hearted at best, and the only last-
ing effect within the Baltic states (as well as in Russia and several other repub-
lics) was to radicalize the opponents of the Soviet Union and the CPSU. The
crackdowns in Vilnius and Riga stirred vigorous protests in Russia, legiti-
mized Yeltsin’s call for Gorbachev’s resignation, and became a focal point for
the founding conference of the Democratic Congress in Kharkiv on 26–27
January 1991. The Congress demanded that the CPSU be removed from
power, encouraged the republics to ºout Gorbachev’s “anti-constitutional”
decrees, and recommended the transfer of control over industrial enterprises
and the army to the republics. Russian political groups that were active in the
Congress subsequently helped Yeltsin gain election to the Russian presidency,
thereby pushing along factors and events that would ultimately spell the end
of the Soviet Union.69
The use of force in January 1991 to prevent Baltic secession was a case of
“too little, too incompetent, too late.” By that point public sentiment in the
Baltic republics had taken on a much more radical edge than in either 1988 or
1989. No longer would the Baltic peoples be satisªed by anything short of
outright independence. Gorbachev, for his part, seemed determined never to
permit independence for the Baltic states, but if that was the case, he should
have used force more decisively and effectively, and at an earlier stage, against
the Baltic separatist movements. Deliberations in the highest bodies of Soviet
power were consistently irresolute from 1987 to 1991. Given the ambivalence
and indecision at the center, as well as the solid determination in the periph-
ery (plus external support from the West and from Eastern Europe for Baltic
independence), the secession of the Baltic republics increasingly moved closer
to reality.70
points between Latvia and Lithuania—the Soviet internal affairs minister, Boris Pugo, publicly
claimed that this action took place without the knowledge and authorization of the central MVD. His
statement, though disingenuous, underscores the lack of central resolve, consensus, and consistency
on the use of force to hold the Soviet Union together. See Pugo’s letter to USSR Supreme Soviet Chair-
man Anatolii Lukyanov, 27 May 1991, in LVA, F. 101, Apr. 67, B. 40, La. 1–2. I am grateful to Mark
Kramer for giving me a copy of this document.
69. For a chronology of these events, see Ed A. Hewett and Victor H. Winston, eds., Milestones in
Glasnost and Perestroika: Politics and People, Vol. 2 (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1991),
pp. 526–529. On the Democratic Congress in Kharkiv, see TsK KPSS, “Ob uchreditel’noi
konferentsii ‘Demokraticheskogo kongressa,’” 5 February 1991, in LVA, F. 101, Ap. 67, B. 35, La.
121–126 (my thanks again to Mark Kramer for this document).
70. As late as August 1990 the U.S. Senate’s consideration of a measure to grant $10 million in hu-
manitarian aid to Lithuania created consternation among Soviet authorities. Understanding the threat
of Lithuania’s separatist nationalism, and knowing that Western aid could only advance this cause, the
Central Committee of the CPSU instructed the Soviet Foreign Ministry to oppose the pending U.S.
measure as interference in Soviet internal affairs and to link the issue to defense negotiations between
the two countries. Again, this illustrates a response that addressed only slim margins of the Baltic se-
cessionist problem and failed utterly to add any variable favorable to keeping the Soviet Union intact.
See TsK KPSS, “K voprosu o gumanitarnoi pomoshchi SShA Litve,” 23 August 1990, Rossiiskii
109
Tuminez
Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Noveishei Istorii (RGANI), F. 89, Op. 21, D. 23, Ll. 1–2. I am grateful to
Mark Kramer for this document.
71. Robert Parsons, “Georgians,” in Smith, ed., Nationalities Question, pp. 190–191.
110
Nationalism, Ethnic Pressures, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union
72. At least one scholar notes that the Azeri Communist Party had ceded Nagorno-Karabakh to Arme-
nia in 1920, but the Soviet government never formalized this cession. In 1923 the region was ofªcially
reincorporated into Azerbaijan. Nagorno-Karabakh symbolizes several things to Armenians: Turkish
genocide against Armenia (many Armenians equate Azeris with Turks), Western betrayal of Armenia
because British forces helped Azerbaijan acquire Nagorno-Karabakh in 1918, and objectionable bor-
der arrangements created by the Soviet regime. See Edmund M. Herzig, “Armenians,” in Smith, ed.,
Nationalities Question, p. 152.
73. Herzig, “Armenians,” p. 156; Human Rights Watch, Seven Years of Conºict in Nagorno-Karabakh
(Helsinki: Human Rights Watch, December 1994); and Gorbachev Foundation, Soyuz mozhno bylo
sokhranit’, p. 25.
111
Tuminez
74. Soviet troops largely stood by during the worst of the anti-Armenian pogroms in Baku in January
1990, but they ªnally moved to suppress the Azerbaijani Popular Front when it became apparent that
the Front was close to seizing power in the republic. Subsequent Azeri reports on the events of January
1990 squarely blame what happened on conspiracies and provocations by Soviet authorities. See
“Troops Still Tense in Baku; Talks in Riga,” Current Digest of the Soviet Press (hereinafter referred to as
CDSP), Vol. 42, No. 5 (1990), pp. 7–10; “Baku: Anti-Army Fury, Russians Evacuated,” CDSP,
Vol. 42, No. 4 (1990), pp. 5–10; Elizabeth Fuller, “The Azerbaijani Presidential Election: A
One-Horse Race,” Report on the USSR, Vol. 3, No. 2 (13 September 1991), pp. 12–14; and “Probe of
1990 Baku Tragedy Faults Center,” CDSP, Vol. 44, No. 9 (1992), pp. 8–10.
75. Gorbachev Foundation, Soyuz mozhno bylo sokhranit’, pp. 16–25; Hewett and Winston, eds., Mile-
stones, Vol. 2, p. 521; and Human Rights Watch, Seven Years of Conºict, p. 2.
112
Nationalism, Ethnic Pressures, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union
that could be brought into Moldova. By the 1970s, however, partly as a result
of the rise of a Moldovan intelligentsia and partly because of the continued
tensions between Bucharest and Moscow, pan-Romanian sentiment began to
reemerge in Moldova. This sentiment was expressed far more openly under
the political liberalization implemented by Gorbachev. By 1989, demands
for reuniªcation with Romania began to surface in Moldova. In August
1989 nearly half a million demonstrators, led by the Popular Front of
Moldova, held a rally in Chiqinäu demanding that Romanian be made the re-
public’s ofªcial language. In April 1990 Moldova replaced its Soviet ºag, and
in June 1990 the Moldovan parliament passed a declaration of sovereignty.
Tensions between Moscow and Chiqinäu continued to grow over the next sev-
eral months. In December 1990 hundreds of thousands of Moldovans gath-
ered to demand independence and to express opposition to any new union
treaty. After the failed August 1991 coup, Moldova declared its independ-
ence.76
As with other refractory groups in the Soviet Union, the central authori-
ties did not respond forcefully to quell Moldovan nationalism. In 1989 Soviet
ofªcials eased travel restrictions between Romania and Moldova and prom-
ised to grant greater cultural rights to the Moldovans. In September 1990
Moscow sent Soviet MVD troops to protect a congress organized by pro-
Soviet activists in Moldova’s Transnistria region (a strip of land along the east
bank of the Dnestr). According to one participant, Moscow wanted to warn
the Popular Front of Moldova that unless it relinquished its bid for independ-
ence, the republic might be dismembered.77 Although this action may have
generated some concern that force would be used on a wider scale, very little
actually came of it. In the end Gorbachev refrained from taking any decisive
steps to crush Moldovan separatism.
Ukraine
Unlike the Baltic republics, Georgia, Armenia, and Moldova, Ukraine did not
have a mass separatist movement during most of the Gorbachev years. There
were certainly organized Ukrainian nationalist groups such as Rukh (formed
in 1989), but none of them approximated the inºuence and numbers of the
76. Charles King, The Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and the Politics of Culture (Stanford, CA: Hoover
Institution Press, 2000); Cheshko, Raspad Sovetskogo Soyuza, pp. 222–23; Jonathan Eyal,
“Moldavians,” in Smith, ed., Nationalities Question, pp. 123–45; and Hewett and Winston, eds.,
Milestones, p. 526. The December 1990 demonstration occurred after Gorbachev refused the
Moldovan government’s offer for Moscow to stop supporting separatist Transnistrian forces in
Moldova in return for Moldova’s support for a union treaty. See the coverage in Izvestiya (Moscow),
5 November 1990, p. 3; and Izvestiya (Moscow), 15 November 1990, p. 5.
77. Stuart J. Kaufman, “Spiraling to Ethnic War: Elites, Masses and Moscow in Moldova’s Civil War,”
International Security, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Fall 1996), p. 130.
113
Tuminez
popular fronts in other republics. One of the factors that tempered Ukrainian
nationalism was the presence of roughly 11 million ethnic Russians in
Ukraine, nearly a quarter of the republic’s population. Although the Russian
minority was concentrated in eastern Ukraine and the Crimea, Ukrainian ac-
tivists were aware that expressions of vehement Ukrainian nationalism might
stimulate an irredentist response from the Russian government, possibly lead-
ing to civil conºict or the dismemberment of the republic. The Ukrainian
population’s ambivalence regarding independence from the Soviet Union was
apparent in the results of the referendum held in March 1991. With an 80.2
percent turnout of registered voters, Ukraine yielded a 70.5 percent afªrm-
ative response to the all-union question regarding the desirability of preserv-
ing the USSR as a “renewed federation.” At the same time, 80.2 percent said
yes to an additional republic question regarding the use of the Ukrainian dec-
laration of sovereignty as the basis for deªning the republic’s status in any fu-
ture federative association.78
By the summer of 1991, especially after the aborted coup d’état in Au-
gust, public sentiment in Ukraine shifted strongly in favor of separatism. On
24 August the Ukrainian parliament adopted a declaration of independence,
and on 1 December 1991 the republic conducted a national referendum on
independence. Over 90 percent of voters, including those in heavily Rus-
sian-populated areas of the republic, voted in favor of Ukrainian independ-
ence. Subsequent analyses show that the majority of voters in Ukraine came
to support independence because they believed that a separate existence from
the USSR might be the best guarantee for their economic well-being. Most of
the Ukrainian political elites who campaigned for independence did not do so
in the name of ethnic Ukrainian nationalism, but in the name of potential
economic advancement. Because Ukrainian politicians (even outspoken na-
tionalists such as Volodymyr Chornovil) did not embrace an ethnic exclusivist
platform, it was much easier for Russians in Ukraine to support the campaign
for independence in the belief that they, too, would enjoy the expected eco-
nomic beneªts.79 The case of Ukraine illustrated less the power of ethnic na-
tionalism than the widespread belief among elites and publics in the periph-
ery that the center was increasingly unable to deliver requisite goods. This
78. Roman Solchanyk, “Centrifugal Movements in Ukraine on the Eve of the Independence Referen-
dum,” Report on the USSR, Vol. 3, No. 48 (29 November 1991), pp. 8–13; and Roman Solchanyk,
“The Referendum in Ukraine: Preliminary Results,” Report on the USSR, Vol. 3, No. 13 (29 March
1991), pp. 5–7.
79. Peter J. Potichnyj, “The Referendum and Presidential Elections in Ukraine,” Canadian Slavonic
Papers, Vol. 33, No. 2 (June 1991), pp. 122–38; Roman Solchanyk, “Ukraine: From Sovereignty to
Independence,” RFE/RL Research Report, Vol. 1, No. 1 (3 January 1992), pp. 35–38; and Bohdan
Nahaylo, “The Birth of an Independent Ukraine,” Report on the USSR, Vol. 3, No. 50 (13 December
1991), pp. 1–4.
114
Nationalism, Ethnic Pressures, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union
point will be further discussed in the section below on the failure of the center
to uphold the economic aspect of the center-periphery compact.
Net Assessment
From the preceding account we can determine whether ethnic challenges were
sufªciently grave to threaten Soviet dismemberment by 1991. My answer is a
qualiªed no. Ethnic separatism was strongest in the Baltic republics, and,
given that region’s history and the support voiced by Western countries (espe-
cially the Scandinavian countries) for Baltic independence, the Baltic govern-
ments were unlikely to yield on secession from mid-1990 on. In the early
years of perestroika, however, when Baltic leaders were strongly supportive of
Gorbachev, a union treaty offered with real autonomy would have sufªced for
some time, perhaps indeªnitely.80 By late 1990, however, the Soviet Union
could have kept Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia only at great human and mili-
tary cost and at the risk of alienating the West.81
The declarations of independence by Georgia, Armenia, and Moldova
also seemed amenable to negotiation by the center, particularly because all
three of these republics were dealing with conºicts (internal and otherwise)
that Moscow could have manipulated to its advantage. Georgia and Moldova
were confronted by secessionist movements on their territory, and Armenia
was embroiled in the conºict over Nagorno-Karabakh. In Moldova, President
Mircea Snegur actually expressed willingness to support Gorbachev’s union
treaty in late 1990 in exchange for Moscow’s termination of support for sepa-
ratists in Transnistria.82 With regard to Armenia, an early resolution of the sta-
tus of Nagorno-Karabakh (either reestablishing it as an Autonomous Soviet
Socialist Republic [ASSR] or putting it under Moscow’s long-term jurisdic-
tion), coupled with the consistent use of force against any potential Armenian
and Azeri violations of such an arrangement, undoubtedly could have kept
Russia’s longtime ally in the Soviet fold.
Mass mobilizations, disturbances, and deaths associated with separatist
nationalism indicated cracks in the Soviet state ediªce, but these were not se-
vere enough to destroy the state. From September 1985 to August 1989,
80. This point is stressed in Simonyan, “Strany Baltii v gody Gorbachevskoi perestroiki,” pp. 56–60
81. Even if the USSR let the Baltic republics go, the loss would have been small in terms of territory
and population (2 percent). The center, however, would have faced a serious challenge of credibly
drawing the separatist line with the Baltics and effectively using force and other means to prevent
other republics from following suit. My arguments in this paper imply that strong political resolve at
the center could have dealt with this challenge, but the absence of such resolve dictated the fate of the
Soviet Union.
82. See Hewett and Winston, eds., Milestones, pp. 525, 532; and Kaufman, “Spiraling to Ethnic War,”
p. 125.
115
Tuminez
forty-seven large demonstrations took place in the Soviet Union, but almost
all of them occurred in the six separatist republics. These demonstrations,
though attended by vast numbers of people, were peaceful and did not fatally
threaten Soviet power. During this same period, deaths resulting from actions
to quell nationalist separatism numbered in the low hundreds (predominantly
in the Caucasus) and did not increase dramatically even by 1991. It is worth
noting that, elsewhere in the world, when states have sought to quell armed
ethnic separatism, they have been able to do so for long periods of time (even
if they ultimately fail), as long as they are willing to tolerate great costs in lives
and resources. This has been the case with the Kashmiris in India, the Kurds
in Turkey, the Moros in the Philippines, the Timorese in Indonesia, the
Eritreans in Ethiopia (who managed to break away only after thirty years of
ªerce civil war), the Tamils in Sri Lanka, and other groups.83 In another in-
stance, when the Ottoman empire faced ethnic separatist revolts from thou-
sands of its subjects in the 1870s in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Bulgaria (aided
by Serbia and Montenegro), the empire used brutal force and continued to
survive for another four decades.84 Under Gorbachev, by contrast, the Soviet
government treated nationalist groups in a civilized way, taking such measures
as the passage of a Law on Secession in April 1990 and even creating legal ob-
stacles to the center’s blatant use of force.85 As a whole, the central authorities’
indecision and civility were a weightier cause of Soviet disintegration than the
strength of nationalist separatism itself.
Ethnic Conflicts
This section will discuss the severity of a number of ethnic conºicts, including
intercommunal violence and ethnically grounded protests against the center.
To what extent did these events threaten the cohesion of the Soviet state? The
ªrst signiªcant ethnic conºict under Gorbachev occurred in 1986 in Kaz-
akhstan, when Moscow replaced the First Secretary of the republic’s Commu-
nist Party with an ethnic Russian. Thousands of young people rioted and van-
dalized Communist Party property in Alma-Ata, the capital.86 Soviet troops
83. See Morton M. Halperin and David J. Scheffer, Self-Determination in the New World Order (Wash-
ington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1992); and Alexis Heraclides, The Self-
Determination of Minorities in International Politics (London: Frank Cass, 1991).
84. Tuminez, Russian Nationalism since 1856, pp. 156–158.
85. For example, the Soviet law on emergency presidential power could be applied only with the con-
sent of republic leaders, making it more difªcult for Moscow to exercise arbitrary authority in the re-
publics.
86. Alma-Ata was later renamed Almaty. In the post-Soviet era it ceased to be the capital of
Kazakhstan (a status now enjoyed by Agmola), but it remains the informal capital.
116
Nationalism, Ethnic Pressures, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union
met the rioters with force, killing two people. According to a KGB account,
some of those who were wounded and taken to hospitals also subsequently
died. The ofªcial death toll from this incident remains at two, but the actual
number who died may be as high as ten.87
The most serious ethnic conºict during Gorbachev’s rule was the war
over Nagorno-Karabakh. Although full-scale war between Armenia and
Azerbaijan did not erupt until after the Soviet Union disintegrated, more than
eight hundred people were killed in this conºict during the Gorbachev era.
Among the dead were at least thirty-two Armenians killed in pogroms in
Sumgait in 1988, sixty-eight or more Armenians killed in pogroms in Baku in
January 1990, and approximately 150 Azeris killed by Soviet troops in Baku
the same month. In addition, from 1988 to January 1990 as many as 600,000
people were forcibly displaced by the conºict.88
Nagorno-Karabakh had the makings of an intractable conºict and
proved to be one in the post-Soviet period.89 However, as is true of most
conºicts, actions taken at an earlier stage to prevent escalation could have
made the task of conºict management easier. In 1988, when the conºict
turned violent and Armenian and NKAO ofªcials formally announced that
the region had been incorporated into Armenia, Soviet leaders could have de-
fused (or at least contained) the dispute by decisively settling the status of
Nargorno-Karabakh, most likely by making it an ASSR or putting it under
direct presidential rule, with the promise of swift and harsh punishment for
paramilitary groups on either side who might violate the arrangement. Far
from being decisive, however, the Soviet government’s response to Nagorno-
Karabakh was slow and irresolute, reºecting naïveté and a partial abdication
of central responsibility.90 In early 1988 Gobachev recommended more glas-
nost between Armenia and Azerbaijan and asked both sides to adhere to the
spirit of “socialist internationalism.” Others, such as KGB Chairman Viktor
117
Tuminez
Chebrikov, proposed using the army at an early stage, but the CPSU Polit-
buro rejected his suggestion. Others in the Politburo preferred granting more
economic aid to Nagorno-Karabakh and creating a special commission to re-
solve the territory’s status. In top-level meetings at the Kremlin Gorbachev
constantly eschewed military solutions in favor of vague political measures.
He said he understood that people’s frustration was rising and that many were
asking, “Where is Soviet power? How much more can we take?” But he in-
sisted that the only answer was “reconciliation” (primirenie). 91
The Soviet government’s eventual use of force in Baku in January 1990
was ostensibly intended to stop interethnic ªghting, but in reality it was de-
signed to crush the Azerbaijani Popular Front, which had already seized power
in the Lenkoran and Dzhalilabad districts of the republic and taken down the
border posts between Azerbaijan and Iran. The invasion of Azerbaijan marked
the apex of the central government’s resolve to use force to hold the union to-
gether (spurred perhaps by the immediate precedent of the collapse of Com-
munist power in Eastern Europe and the USSR’s loss of its “outer empire”).92
After Soviet troops intervened, the central government imposed emergency
rule in Azerbaijan, forcing the Azerbaijani Popular Front into retreat. Some of
the Front’s extremist leaders went underground, and the Azerbaijani Commu-
nist Party was able to reconstitute itself and resume its functions under the
new leadership of Ayaz Mutalibov, who could rely on Soviet troops for protec-
tion. The center’s use of force did not end the ethnic conºict over
Nagorno-Karabakh, but it effectively stemmed Azerbaijan’s separatist crisis.
Only in late 1991, after the failed August coup and the precipitous decline of
authority and consensus at the center, did Azeri leaders reassert their inde-
pendence against Moscow.93
91. Gorbachev Foundation, Soyuz mozhno bylo sokhranit’, pp. 23–30; and Gorbachev’s address to Ar-
menia and Azerbaijan in Moskovskii komosomolets (Moscow), 27 February 1988, p. 1. The Azerbaijani
leader, Ayaz Mutalibov, indicated in a report in 1992 that a “crisis of power,” characterized in large
part by the center’s “indecisiveness” and the disappearance of trust in the center’s ability to govern, was
a key factor in the crises that struck Azerbaijan in January 1990. See “Probe of 1990 Baku Tragedy
Faults Center,” p. 8.
92. See Kramer, “Collapse of Communism,” pp. 178–256.
93. Mutalibov, who supported the August 1991 coup, had to restore his legitimacy and credibility as
leader of Azerbaijan by stepping down as head of the party, lifting the Moscow-imposed state of emer-
gency in the republic, and agreeing to hold presidential elections in September 1991. In his campaign
for the presidency he promised to resolve the Nagorno-Karabakh problem and to implement eco-
nomic reform, and he also portrayed himself as the champion of the Azerbaijani nation against inter-
nal and external sowers of discord. See “Breaking Up the Empire?” Newsweek, 5 February 1990,
pp. 28–29; Elizabeth Fuller, “Will Azerbaijan Be the Next ‘Domino’?” Report on the USSR, Vol. 2,
No. 2 (12 January 1990), pp. 17–18; V. Savichev, “Democracy or Stability?” Argumenty i fakty, No. 39
(29 September–5 October 1990), p. 4, in CDSP, Vol. 42, No. 40 (1990), pp. 23–24; Aidyn Mekhtiev,
“Azerbaijan: Communist Party Dissolved,” Nezavisimaya gazeta, 17 September 1991, p. 3, in CDSP,
Vol. 43, No. 37 (1991), p. 31; “President Mutalibov Elected President,” Nezavisimaya gazeta, 10 Sep-
tember 1991, p. 3, in CDSP, Vol. 43, No. 36 (1991), p. 35; and Vladimir Sergeev, “Mutalibov Tries to
118
Nationalism, Ethnic Pressures, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union
Justify Himself,” Nezavisimaya gazeta, 24 August 1991, p. 3, in CDSP, Vol. 43, No. 34 (1991),
pp. 38–39.
94. Hill, Report on Ethnic Conºict, p. 74.
95. Ibid.; and John Lloyd, “The Guns Come Out Again in Georgia,” Financial Times (London),
19 February 1991, p. 4.
119
Tuminez
Georgia’s own declaration of sovereignty vis-à-vis the Soviet Union.96 The sit-
uation remained at an impasse until after the Soviet Union broke up, when
armed hostilities resumed between Georgia and Abkhaziya.
The conºicts in Georgia posed a challenge to Soviet authority by 1991
but were not so unmanageable as to threaten the cohesion of the Soviet
Union. Because it seemed likely that Georgia itself would be dismembered if
it broke away from the USSR, the Soviet government could easily have ex-
ploited the Abkhaziyan and South Ossetian conºicts to its own beneªt.97
However, most of the actions taken by the central authorities were too late or
too timid to make any difference. In January 1991 Gorbachev issued an ulti-
matum for Tbilisi either to restore South Ossetia’s status as an autonomous re-
public (a designation that Gamsakhurdia had annulled) or to face the entry of
Soviet troops into the republic. The Georgian authorities simply ignored this
ultimatum, without suffering reprisals. After ªghting broke out between
Ossetians and Georgians in the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali in 1991,
Soviet MVD troops came to keep the peace. But the peace did not last long,
and renewed skirmishes continued long after the Soviet Union disintegrated
in December 1991.
In Central Asia the most intense ethnic conºict during the Gorbachev era
erupted in June 1990 between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz in the Osh region of
Kyrgyzstan (along the Ferghana Valley). Several days of interethnic rioting,
and a crackdown by Soviet troops, resulted in 148 deaths and more than a
thousand serious injuries. The immediate cause of the violence was a dispute
between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks over the distribution of homestead land. Many
Uzbeks were angered by the Soviet government’s decision to grant land to eth-
nic Kyrgyz, a program that seemed to exclude the Uzbeks.98 A related conºict
arose between Uzbeks and Meshkhetian Turks, an ethnic group that had been
deported en masse to Central Asia by Stalin. To curb the bloodshed, Soviet
ofªcials ended up evacuating 4,500 Meshkhetian Turks to Russia for resettle-
ment. These violent incidents, though problematic for Soviet authorities,
tended to be contained and did not lead to chronic instability. Moreover, the
union republics involved, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, remained strong sup-
porters of the preservation of the USSR.99
96. Hill, Report on Ethnic Conºict, pp. 95–107; and Seymour, ed., ACCESS Guide, pp. 44–46 and
61–62.
97. Indeed, by 1992 the post-Soviet Russian government was regularly exploiting Georgia’s internal
divisions to keep the newly independent Georgian state within Russia’s sphere of inºuence in the
Commonwealth of Independent States.
98. “40 Reported Dead in Soviet Clashes,” The New York Times, 7 June 1990, pp. 1, 8; and Hewett
and Winston, eds., Milestones, p. 521.
99. Other ethnic clashes also produced fatalities in Central Asia, including the killing of 18 people in
Dushanbe in February 1990 after rumors spread that Armenian refugees were getting preferential
120
Nationalism, Ethnic Pressures, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union
treatment in housing. Another was a confrontation in western Kazakhstan between Kazakhs and im-
migrants from the Caucasus, resulting in ªve deaths and numerous injuries. These, however, do not
modify the assessment that ethnic conºicts did not directly threaten the integrity of the Soviet Union.
See Hewett and Winston, eds., Milestones, p. 519; Annette Bohr, “Violence Erupts in Uzbekistan,” Re-
port on the USSR, Vol. 1, No. 24 (16 June 1989), pp. 23–25; and Ann Sheehy, “Interethnic Distur-
bances in Western Kazakhstan,” Report on the USSR, Vol. 1, No. 27 (7 July 1989), pp. 11–14.
100. On the Gagauz question, see the articles by Dmitrii Gamain, R. Yunku, ed., K voprosu o
Gagauzskoi avtonomii (Chiqinäu: Kartia Moldoveniaske, 1990).
101. Tishkov, “Soviet Empire,” p. 214.
102. For a contrasting view, see Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet
State.x
121
Tuminez
curb the demands of ethnic groups and to prevent the outbreak or escalation
of ethnic conºicts.103 The fact that mass killings, ethnic wars, refugee ºows,
and other disturbances intensiªed after the Soviet Union broke apart, and yet
none of the post-Soviet states collapsed as a result, further bolsters the conclu-
sion that the Soviet Union could have survived the challenge of ethnic
conºicts on its territory.
122
Nationalism, Ethnic Pressures, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union
p. 69. The other ªgures come from Tishkov, “Soviet Empire,” pp. 204–207; and CIS Statistical Com-
mittee, 1989 USSR Population Census, Vol. 3, (Minneapolis: East View Publications, 1996), table 8.
My thanks to Henry Hale for the census data.
105. Tishkov, “Soviet Empire,” pp. 204–207; Nahaylo and Swoboda, Soviet Disunion, p. 174; Carrère
d’Encausse, Decline of an Empire, pp. 47–120; and Bromlei, “Etnicheskie protsessy,” pp. 56–65.
123
Tuminez
was not the core element in the Baltic peoples’ opposition to the Soviet
Union. The perceived illegitimacy of Soviet rule in the Baltic states was a his-
torical reality aggravated, but not caused, by demographic factors.
Linguistic pressures in the Soviet Union proved only slightly more
difªcult to contain than the demographic trends. In some cases language
grievances facilitated the rise of ethnic nationalism. Some of the titular groups
wanted their own language to predominate over Russian, which had long
been the lingua franca in the Soviet Union. In addition, many of the
non-Slavic nationalities were irritated that the Russians who had settled in
their republics never bothered to learn the local language. According to the
1970 census, for example, only 3 percent of some 20 million Russians living
outside the RSFSR had learned the native languages of their republics.106
In 1989 and 1990, almost every republic of the Soviet Union passed a
law or constitutional amendment conferring ofªcial status on the language of
the titular nationality. The three republics that did not do this—Georgia,
Armenia, and Azerbaijan—already had provisions in their 1978 constitutions
establishing their languages as the ofªcial ones in their republics. The lan-
guage laws passed in 1989 and 1990 fell into two categories: those intended
to facilitate the predominance of the indigenous language over Russian (in Es-
tonia, Lithuania, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan; and those that
sought to accommodate multiple languages and to designate each language’s
functions within the republic (Latvia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Belarus).107
No strict correlation exists between the republics that passed the strictest lan-
guage laws and those that were most intent on separating from the Soviet
Union. One reason that language was not a particularly salient factor in the
breakup of the Soviet Union was that Soviet language laws and practices were
generally liberal. The Soviet regime pursued a dual policy that, on the one
hand, developed Russian as a means of efªcient communication for an empire
in which more than a hundred languages were spoken, and that, on the other
hand, also preserved the distinctiveness of many non-Russian languages. So-
viet language policy never sought to extirpate the use of non-Russian lan-
guages; instead, it was adjusted to take account of the political status of a na-
tionality and the size and population density of an ethnic group.108
124
Nationalism, Ethnic Pressures, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union
Even more than demographic and linguistic trends, religion was only a
peripheral factor in the breakup of the Soviet Union. Contrary to the expecta-
tions of some, Islam in Azerbaijan and Central Asia did not serve as a catalyst
for mass discontent with, or rebellion against, Soviet rule. The Soviet regime
over time had implemented policies to prevent the rise of pan-Islamic solidar-
ity among the republics of Central Asia, to siphon Islamic activities into four
ofªcially approved muftiates in the country, and to keep “the religious fervor
of believers within limits prescribed by Soviet laws.”109 The CPSU Central
Committee acknowledged in 1990 that its approach to Islam had been nar-
row and simplistic, and that under the pretext of ªghting “reactionary Islamic
traditions” it had quelled legitimate national traditions and caused the es-
trangement of Muslims from the Soviet regime.110 Nonetheless, even when
Gorbachev decreed freedom of conscience and religion, this opening did not
rouse Muslims in the USSR to rally around Islam and to ªght against Mos-
cow. Similarly, among the Christian denominations that were long identiªed
with nationalist causes—the Armenian Gregorian Church, the Georgian Or-
thodox Church, the Catholic Church in Lithuania, and the Uniate Church in
western Ukraine—only the Catholic Church in Lithuania (and, to a lesser ex-
tent, the Uniate Church in Ukraine) became a signiªcant factor in the rise of
anti-Soviet ethnonationalism. Underground publications of the Catholic
Church and its adherents, protests against Soviet religious oppression, and in-
ternational petitions on behalf of the Church over the years helped forge Lith-
uanian national identity and strengthen sentiments against the empire.111
109. Bociurkiw, “Nationalities and Soviet Religious Policies,” p. 157; and Alexandre Bennigsen and
S. Enders Wimbush, Muslims of the Soviet Empire: A Guide (London: Hurst, 1985), pp. 14–35.
110. TsK KPSS, “O postanovlenii TsK KPSS ‘Ob usilenii bor’by s vliyaniem islama’ (no. P24/54 ot 18
avgusta 1986 goda),” 7 August 1990, in RGANI, F. 89, Op. 11, D. 5, Ll. 1–3; and TsK KPSS, “Ob
izmenenii soderzhaniya ateisticheskoi raboty v regionakh traditsionnogo rasprostraneniya islama,” 20
July 1990, in RGANI, F. 89, Op. 11, D. 5, Ll. 4–5. My thanks to Mark Kramer for these documents.
111. Bociurkiw, “Nationalities and Soviet Religious Policies,” pp. 148–176; and Nahaylo and
Swoboda, Soviet Disunion, p. 163.
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Tuminez
army, the KGB, the MVD, the economic and military-industrial ministries,
and other organizations—were concentrated in Moscow. Because of the dom-
inant role of Russia in the maintenance of the Soviet imperial state, a consen-
sus among Russians on the value of empire was needed to hold the Soviet
Union together.
In 1990 and 1991, Russian support for the maintenance of the Soviet
state critically wavered. This was partly a result of Russian nationalism. How-
ever, unlike other nationalisms in the Soviet republics, Russian nationalism
did not involve mass ethnic mobilization against the center. Instead, it was
conªned to a narrow circle of elites, especially Yeltsin and his supporters, who
used nationalist rhetoric and arguments to wrest legitimacy from Gorbachev
as head of the Soviet Union and to argue for a preponderant Russian state that
would eclipse the Soviet regime. As discussed below, Yeltsin and his entourage
did not realize until too late that their espousal of Russian nationalism and a
preponderant role for Russia would deal a fatal blow to the Soviet state (as op-
posed to the Soviet regime). Yeltsin managed to exact his revenge against
Gorbachev, but at the cost of losing the Soviet Union. The wider popula-
tion in the RSFSR—though not mobilized in opposition to the Soviet
Union—was also pivotal in the disintegration of the empire. The large major-
ity of Russians proved indifferent to the cause of empire, being unconvinced
of its value and unwilling to act or make sacriªces for its maintenance. In es-
sence, Russian elites and masses both lost the will to preserve the empire and
ended up defecting from it.
At the elite level, consensus broke down as rival centers of power—one
led by Gorbachev and the other by Yeltsin—vied for supremacy in Moscow. A
strong element of personal animosity marked this rivalry, arising from
Gorbachev’s decision in October 1987 to humiliate Yeltsin and remove him
from the Politburo.112 Yeltsin was intent on seeking revenge. He effectively
used Russian nationalist rhetoric to challenge Gorbachev and wrest central
power from him. When seeking to become chair of the Russian Supreme So-
viet in 1990 and to win election to the Russian presidency in 1991, Yeltsin
adopted populist and nationalist themes. Initially he called for economic, po-
litical, and cultural independence for all peoples of the USSR; then he sharp-
ened his rhetoric to identify Russia’s “spiritual, national, and economic re-
birth” as the main task of Russians. He argued that Russia for too long had
been an appendage of the Soviet center and had lost its independence. He
co-opted symbols used by his more strident nationalist opponents, and he or-
dered the restoration of the Russian tricolor ºag. For his inauguration as Rus-
sian president, he invited the head of the Russian Orthodox Church to speak,
126
Nationalism, Ethnic Pressures, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union
and he subsequently promoted Mikhail Glinka’s “A Life for the Tsar” as the
national anthem.113
If only inadvertently, Yeltsin and his colleagues repeatedly thwarted
Gorbachev’s efforts to save the Soviet Union. For example, at the ªrst Russian
Congress of People’s Deputies in May 1990, Yeltsin urged the parliament to
pursue bilateral treaties with other union-republics. In August 1990, in a
speech to the Latvian parliament, he further urged the destruction of the hier-
archical core of the Soviet Union, cast doubts on the viability of a new union
treaty, and proposed a loose confederative grouping of Soviet republics in a
“commonwealth of sovereign states.”114 Under Yeltsin’s leadership, Russia
signed bilateral treaties with other union-republics, including Ukraine and
Kazakhstan in 1990, creating a network of pseudo-interstate relations within
the Soviet Union.
Throughout 1991, members of Yeltsin’s team, especially Gennadii Bur-
bulis, worked to create a new Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)
that would replace the Soviet Union. At the same time, Yeltsin himself main-
tained the appearance of cooperating with Gorbachev on a new union treaty.
This dual approach was evident when Russia participated in the referendum
on the union in March 1991 but added a separate question on the desirability
of holding popular elections for the Russian presidency (a step that would un-
dermine the legitimacy of Gorbachev, who had not been popularly elected as
president of the Soviet Union). Yeltsin also campaigned against a “yes” vote
for the union, arguing that the proponents of the measure wanted to “preserve
the imperial, unitary essence of the Union.” 115 Similarly, although he signed
with Gorbachev (and eight other republic leaders) what journalists hailed as a
“landmark agreement” on a union treaty in April 1991, he simultaneously
was negotiating with Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan on his proposal to
form the CIS. In the ultimate betrayal of Gorbachev, Yeltsin joined with the
leaders of Belarus and Ukraine on 8 December 1991 in announcing the cre-
ation of the CIS and the demise of the Soviet Union, precluding any further
consideration of Gorbachev’s draft union treaty. Yeltsin and his aides pursued
the CIS option in the belief that it would provide a means for keeping most of
the Soviet Union together, with Russia at the head. They planned to consign
Gorbachev and other Soviet institutions to a purely ªgurehead role. It is tell-
ing, in this regard, that just ten days before the Ukrainian referendum on in-
113. Laba, “How Yeltsin’s Exploitation,” pp. 5–13; John B. Dunlop, The Rise of Russia and the Fall of
the Soviet Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 38–62; and John Morrison,
Boris Yeltsin: From Bolshevik to Democrat (New York: Dutton, 1991), pp. 142–143.
114. Gorbachev Foundation, Soyuz mozhno bylo sokhranit’, pp. 106–108.
115. Radio Rossiya, 15 March 1991, quoted in Ann Sheehy, “The All-Union and RSFSR Referendums
of March 17,” Report on the USSR, Vol. 3, No. 13 (29 March 1991), p. 20.
127
Tuminez
dependence, Yeltsin refused to believe expert data and analyses indicating that
Ukraine would likely vote for independence. 116
The breakdown of consensus at the mass level regarding the value of em-
pire manifested itself in several ways: in electoral support for Yeltsin; in the
growing unpopularity of Gorbachev; in the absence of a mass movement fa-
voring the maintenance of empire and Russia’s leading role in it; and in Rus-
sian public support for secessionist movements outside Russia. Yeltsin, as al-
ready mentioned, used nationalist rhetoric in his successful campaigns for
parliamentary chair in 1990 and for the Russian presidency in 1991, an elec-
tion he won handily. When Soviet troops moved against Lithuania and Latvia
in January 1991, large crowds of Muscovites expressed solidarity with the Bal-
tic governments by signing petitions at the “embassies” that Yeltsin had al-
lowed the Baltic states to open in Moscow in 1990. On 20 January more than
150,000 people took part in a protest rally in Moscow organized by Yeltsin’s
allies in the “Democratic Russia” movement, an event that dismayed Soviet
leaders because of the “anti-Soviet” and “anti-Communist” condemnations of
Soviet policy in the Baltics.117 The outpouring of Russian public support for
the Baltic republics came as a surprise even to the Baltic representatives them-
selves.118 A month later when the Russian parliament tried to oust Yeltsin (a
move backed at least indirectly by Gorbachev), some 400,000 people showed
up in a demonstration on the Russian leader’s behalf. The only major groups
in the RSFSR that strongly supported the maintenance of empire were the ex-
treme Russian nationalists. However, they fared poorly in all the elections in
1989–1991—the 1989 Soviet parliamentary elections, the 1990 Russian par-
liamentary campaign, and the 1991 Russian presidential election. Leading
116. Galina Starovoitova, then adviser to Yeltsin, said that Yeltsin was shocked when told that approxi-
mately 75 percent of Ukrainian voters would likely say “yes” to independence. Yeltsin said that out-
come was impossible. See tape of Galina Starovoitova comments, “Seminar on Russia, the Caucasus,
Central Asia, and Ukraine,” Carnegie Corporation of New York, 5 November 1997. Adam Ulam, in
contrast, claims (incorrectly) that Yeltsin realized “just in time [after the August 1991 coup] that the
system . . . could not be preserved, and it was he who delivered the ªnal blow to both the Soviet Union
and to the political career of his one-time boss and tormentor.” See Adam B. Ulam, “Charting the
Communist Collapse,” Washington Post Book World, 5 January 1997, p. 2 and Laba, “How Yeltsin’s
Exploitation,” pp. 5–13. Because Yeltsin’s team had been pursuing a CIS-type option as early as 1990
(as indicated by Burbulis himself), it is difªcult to accept Ulam’s argument that the CIS indicated
Yeltsin’s foresight in light of the near impossibility of saving the union after August 1991. For
Burbulis’s account of Russian negotiations with other republics, see Gorbachev Foundation, Soyuz
mozhno bylo sokhranit’, pp. 290–292, 289–306; “Gorbachev and Yeltsin Agree to Union Treaty,”
Financial Times (London), 25 April 1991, p. 1; and “Sideshow to Soviet Votes: Gorbachev vs. Yeltsin,”
The New York Times, 17 March 1991, p. 10.
117. “Zapiska o manifestatsii 20 yanvarya 1991 goda,” Memorandum No. 8 (Top Secret) from Yurii
Prokof ’ev, 22 January 1991, ªrst secretary of the municipal CPSU committee in Moscow, to the
CPSU Politburo and Secretariat, in RGANI, F. 89, Op. 12, D. 31, Ll. 1–2. My thanks to Mark
Kramer for giving me a copy of this document.
118. See Simonyan, “Strany Baltii v Gorbachevskoi perestroika,’” p. 65.
128
Nationalism, Ethnic Pressures, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union
ªgures in the pro-empire camp fared so dismally in 1990 that they received
less than the minimum threshold of 4 percent of the vote.119
Outside electoral politics there was no evident mass movement in Russia
for the preservation of the Soviet Union (not to mention for the continued
leadership of Gorbachev, who was the strongest articulator and supporter of a
renewed union). The closest perhaps that Russians came to saying they still
wanted the USSR to continue in some form was during the March 1991 ref-
erendum. Of the nearly 76 percent of eligible Russian voters who turned out,
roughly 71 percent cast ballots in favor of the union. But this afªrmative vote
was not as enthusiastic as it might appear. The 71 percent reºected barely half
(53.5 percent) of the eligible voters in Russia. In nearly equal numbers (69.85
percent) they said “yes” to Yeltsin’s question regarding elections for a new Rus-
sian presidency, a measure opposed by Gorbachev.120 Several months later,
when Ukraine voted for independence and the Belovezhskaya Pushcha ac-
cords became a fait accompli, no mass protests ensued in Russia against the
CIS or Yeltsin, whose team had engineered the demise of the USSR.
Many Russians, reacting to glasnost’s revelations about past injustices
inºicted by the Soviet regime on Russians (as well as other nationalities) in the
Soviet Union, resented the blame heaped on the RSFSR by those who
equated Russia with the Soviet regime. Many of them also were angered by
the country’s impoverishment and other ills that, in their view, stemmed from
Moscow’s imperial burdens. As a result they disavowed the Soviet empire and
even supported (or at least did not oppose) secessionist movements. Some ar-
gued that the Soviet regime had discriminated against Russians as an ethnic
group in terms of resource allocation, educational opportunities, occupational
support, and representation in the Communist Party.121 The nationalist writer
Valentin Rasputin was the ªrst to propose (jokingly, some have said) in 1989
that Russia should “secede from the union.” Legislators in the Russian Con-
119. Tuminez, Russian Nationalism since 1856, pp. 207–208; Laba, “How Yeltsin’s Exploitation,” p. 9;
and Carrère d’Encausse, End of the Soviet Empire, p. 188.
120. Sheehy, “All-Union and RSFSR Referendums,” pp. 19–23.
121. In an evocative phrase Carrère d’Encausse characterizes Russian nationalism under Gorbachev as
“not the triumphalist nationalism of a people that have had a revelation of their power, but a national-
ism of suffering and shame.” See Carrère d’Encausse, End of the Soviet Empire, p. 175. See also Mikhail
Shirokii, “Perestroika, natsional’naya problema v SSSR i russkoe patrioticheskoe dvizhenie,” Vestnik
Russkogo Khristianskogo Dvizheniya, No. 153 (1988), p. 192; Vladimir Balakhonov, “Sokhranenie
imperii ili samosokhranenie na puti natsional’nogo suveriniteta—glavnaya natsional’ naya problema
russkogo naroda segodnya,” Russkaya mysl’, (Paris), 23 June 1989, p. 7; Leon Onikov, KPSS:
Anatomiya raspada. Vzglyad iznutri apparata TsK (Moscow: Respublika, 1996), pp. 115–17; Igor
Shafarevich, Russofobia (Munich: Rossiiskoe natsional’noe ob”edinenie, 1989); Galina Starovoitova,
“Deti Rossii,” Literaturnaya gazeta, 9 October 1991, p. 2; Lidia Grafova, “Stalinskie igry,” Literatur-
naya gazeta, 9 October 1991, p. 2; and V. Kozlov, “Russkii vopros: Istoriya, soveremennost’,
budushchee,” Vesti gorodov yuga Rossii and Krasnodarskie izvestiya [joint issue], 27 February 1993,
p. 17.
129
Tuminez
gress of People’s Deputies followed in 1990 with a call for Russian sovereignty
and even independent statehood. In March 1990 the Moscow City Soviet
sent a telegram to Vytautas Landsbergis in Lithuania to support the republic’s
drive for independence and self-determination. In April 1990, 50 percent of
Russians polled in Vilnius supported Lithuanian secession. Yeltsin, with mass
support behind him, also went to Lithuania in 1991 to exhibit solidarity with
the Baltic cause after Soviet force was used in Vilnius and Riga in January
1991. 122 The extent of public support for Yeltsin’s stance became evident
when many Russians signed petitions pledging solidarity with Lithuania and
Latvia. In plebiscites on Estonian and Latvian independence in March 1991,
many (though not all) Russians in these republics came out in support of in-
dependence. In Riga, Latvia, for example, with a population that was only
one-third Latvian, 60.7 percent voted for independence. In every election
district in Latvia (a republic with a population that was only half Latvian)
the majority of voters favored Latvian independence. In Estonia, Russian-
dominated cities like Sillamae and Narva did vote against independence; but
in urban areas overall—the areas in which 92 percent of Estonia’s Russians
lived—the vote afªrming independence was 65 percent (with a 78 percent
voter turnout). Because Estonians as a whole constituted only half the popu-
lation in urban centers, one can assume that a signiªcant percentage of ethnic
Russians in the cities voted in support of Estonian independence. 123
Without a ªrm consensus in the center regarding the value and desirabil-
ity of empire, the Soviet Union could not continue to exist. Indeed, after Rus-
sia declared its sovereignty in June 1990, other republics followed, including
Ukraine, Belarus, and the Central Asian republics, which did not have strong
national-separatist movements. By the end of 1990 all ªfteen union republics
had declared sovereignty, and the end of the Soviet Union began to loom
large.
Economic advances were one of the Soviet state’s instruments for keeping cen-
ter-periphery relations intact. Under Gorbachev, however, this part of the
compact also unraveled. Although a full discussion of Soviet economic devel-
122. Kionka, “Estonians,” p. 51; Tishkov, “Soviet Empire,” p. 206; and Suzanne Crow, “Support
within USSR for Lithuania’s Independence Drive,” Report on the USSR, Vol. 2, No. 15 (13 April
1990), pp. 3–4.
123. Dzintra Bungs, “Poll Shows Majority in Latvia Endorses Independence,” Report on the USSR,
Vol. 3, No. 12 (15 March 1991), pp. 22–25; and Riina Kionka, “Estonia Says ‘Yes’ to Independence,”
Report on the USSR, Vol. 3, No. 12 (15 March 1991), pp. 25–26.
130
Nationalism, Ethnic Pressures, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union
opments under Gorbachev is beyond the scope of this article, several points
are worth emphasizing.124
First, the Soviet Union was not in a state of economic crisis when
Gorbachev came to power in 1985. From 1985 to 1988 most economic indi-
cators—agricultural production, industrial production, food output, retail-
trade volumes, consumer-goods production, and volume of services—in
Russia and other Soviet republics actually improved.125
Second, only after Gorbachev’s introduction of economic reforms did
centrifugal tensions, strikes, and interethnic conºicts arise and expose the
weakness of the centralized economy. In the face of these problems the center
had little independent wherewithal to generate economic resources from a pe-
riphery that was no longer bound by rigid discipline and fear. Republics, in-
cluding Russia under the increasingly deªant Yeltsin, failed to fulªll produc-
tion plans or simply withheld resources from the center. By the ªrst half of
1990, republic budgets overall were running a surplus, whereas the center’s
budget was in deªcit, causing wide macroeconomic instability.126 The center
at this very time needed extra resources to provide ªnancial aid to troubled re-
gions such as Nagorno-Karabakh (to dampen the conºict there), but no funds
were available.
Third, by 1990–1991 clear signs of an economic crisis had appeared, but
the center under Gorbachev failed to devise and implement policies that
would restore economic cohesion, discipline, and productivity. The crisis
took the form of sharp drops in food and other production, in availability of
housing, and in popular consumption. The available data suggest that the
supply of all products in the USSR was halved in 1985–1990, coinciding
with the period of perestroika. In some cases staple foods were rationed, as
prices (especially in non-state stores) rose, and reports of hunger and poverty
in places like Ukraine circulated.127 In the summer of 1990, having promised
124. The economic dimension of the Soviet collapse is examined in depth in Gertrude Schroeder,
“The Soviet Economy and the Fate of the USSR,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Summer
2004), forthcoming.
125. The point here is a general one: There were problems in the Soviet economy, but it was not an
economy in crisis. For the statistics cited here, see Alan B. Pollard, ed., USSR Facts and Figures Annual
(Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press): Vol. 12 (1988), pp. 488–93; Vol. 13 (1989),
pp. 495–99; Vol. 14 (1990), pp. 396–99; and Vol. 15 (1991), pp. 486–487.
126. John Tedstrom, “Economic Slide Continues,” Report on the USSR, Vol. 2, No. 37 (14 September
1990), pp. 9–12; and John Tedstrom, “Disintegration of the Soviet Economy,” Report on the USSR,
Vol. 3, No. 1 (4 January 1991), pp. 3–4.
127. Theodore W. Karasik, ed., USSR Facts and Figures Annual, Vol. 17 (Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic
International Press, 1992), pp. 208–109; Stephen K. Wegren, “Food Prices in the USSR,” Report on
the USSR, Vol. 2, No. 12 (23 March 1990), pp. 13–14; William Moskoff, “Popular Attitudes to Food
Shortages,” Report on the USSR, Vol. 2, No. 21 (25 May 1990), pp. 9–12; David Marples, “Poverty
131
Tuminez
to take decisive steps to improve the Soviet economy, Gorbachev ªnally as-
sembled a four-man economic reform team to devise a comprehensive pro-
gram. But he ended up settling for a watered-down compromise proposal
rather than adopting the “500-Day Plan” that the economists proposed. (It is
worth noting that the 500-Day Plan was far from perfect, was belatedly put
together, and might not have resulted in any appreciable improvement even if
Gorbachev had stuck with it.)
Finally, the center not only failed to respond effectively to economic
problems but in the end facilitated secession by agreeing to delegate many
economic prerogatives and powers to the republics in the name of economic
independence (ekonomicheskyia samostoyatel’nost’). This was particularly true
in the Baltic republics, which seemed to cope best with the economic chal-
lenges in the Soviet Union.128 Because the republics that were most intent on
gaining independence were, in relative terms, faring better economically than
the rest of the Soviet Union, the center’s devolution of economic functions in-
advertently reinforced the message that independence from the USSR was a
good thing.
and Hunger Becoming Widespread in Ukraine,” Report on the USSR, Vol. 2, No. 21 (25 May 1990),
pp. 13–15; Keith Bush, “The Economic Problems Remain,” Report on the USSR, Vol. 3, No. 36
(6 September 1991), pp. 37–39; and Mark Rhodes, “Food Supply in the USSR,” Report on the USSR,
Vol. 3, No. 41 (11 October 1991), pp. 10–16.
128. See Karasik, ed., USSR Facts and Figures Annual, Vol. 17, p. 151; Sovet Ministrov SSSR, “O
preobrazovanii gosudarstvennykh soyuznykh predpriyatii, ob”edinenii, i organizatsii, ras-
polozhennykh na territorii Litovskoi SSR, v aktsionernye obshchestva,” 23 October 1990, in LVOA,
F. 1706, Ap. 1, B. 10, La. 11–12; and a Gosplan document, “O formirovanii ekonomicheskikh
vzaimootnoshenii mezhdu Soyuzom SSR i soyuznymi respublikami Pribaltiki, na dogovornoi
osnove,” 29 March 1990, in LVOA, F. 17626, Ap. 1, B. 10, La. 4–7. My thanks to Mark Kramer for
copies of these two documents.
132
Nationalism, Ethnic Pressures, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union
129. Gorbachev, Memoirs, pp. 658–669. This is also evident from the episode recounted in the second
edition of Shaposhnikov’s memoirs, Vybor, 2nd ed. (Moscow: PIK, 1995), pp. 137–138. My thanks to
Mark Kramer for this reference.
130. Burg, “Nationality Elites,” pp. 25–27; and Onikov, KPSS, p. 118.
131. Roeder, “Soviet Federalism.”
132. This point is well made in Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
133
Tuminez
134
Nationalism, Ethnic Pressures, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union
gether might have been shortly after the March 1991 referendum. In all nine
republics that ofªcially participated in the referendum, voters strongly sup-
ported the union (though, admittedly, the results were likely inºuenced by
the wording of the question). Even in the six republics in which voting was
held only at military bases and certain state enterprises (the Baltic states,
Georgia, Moldova, and Armenia), a majority of those who voted were sup-
portive of the union.135 If Gorbachev had needed a legal pretext to institute
presidential rule and use force to preserve the union, this would have been the
moment. But, being a ruler with “a blessedly paciªc turn of mind, he refused
to do so.”136
The Soviet Union did not have to disintegrate in 1991. It might well
have fallen apart eventually, given the inherent weakness of its imperial struc-
ture resulting from the ofªcially encouraged construction and consolidation
of ethnic identities, the center’s growing inability to bring about continued
material improvements in the lives of its citizens, and the rising disillusion-
ment and cynicism in Soviet society. But the downfall need not have occurred
when it did. The Soviet empire could have lasted for many more years, per-
haps even decades, had there been a different leader or set of leaders deter-
mined to maintain imperial control, even at great military, social, and human
cost. Without such leaders in power, the center failed to assert its authority in
a decisive manner. The loss of will at the top ultimately allowed nationalist
and ethnic pressures to rise to the fore, contributing to the destruction of
what only recently had seemed (in the words of the Soviet anthem) “an indis-
soluble union.”
135. Among the nine republics fully participating in the referendum, those that favored the union
treaty ranged from a low of 70 percent in Ukraine to a high of 97 percent in Turkmenistan. See the
data in Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, Referendum in the Soviet Union: Com-
pendium of Reports on the March 17, 1991 Referendum on the Future of the USSR (Washington, DC:
U.S. Government Printing Ofªce, 1991); Gorbachev Foundation, Soyuz mozhno bylo sokhranit’,
pp. 148–149; and Cheshko, Raspad Sovetskogo Soyuza, p. 263.
136. John Lloyd, “When Gorby Went West,” The Observer (London), 17 November 1996, Review
sec., p. X. Gorbachev and his colleagues understood the gravity of the March 1991 referendum. The
CPSU leadership gave strict instructions for all party bodies to do everything possible to ensure that
most voters participated in the referendum and voted afªrmatively. The challenges were clear as
well—as when the Lithuanian Supreme Soviet resolved in January 1991 to conduct its own poll and
not that of the center. But instead of showing an iron ªst, neither the CPSU instructions on the March
referendum nor Gorbachev’s response to the Lithuanian Supreme Soviet indicated that strong and
swift punitive measures would be meted out against those who deªed central orders. In other words,
Soviet leaders knew that the risk of imperial collapse was real, yet they hesitated even at the most cru-
cial moments to wield the brutal power of the state. See “Lithuania Polls Citizens on Preserving
USSR,” CDSP, Vol. 43, No. 3 (1991), pp. 7–8; and “O vsenarodnom golosovanii (referendume) o
sokhranenii Soyuza Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik,” CPSU Secretariat resolution (Top Se-
cret), 1 March 1991, in LVA, F. 101, Ap. 67, B. 36, La. 53–56. My thanks to Mark Kramer for giving
me a copy of this document.
135
Tuminez
Acknowledgments
I want to thank Vicky Dorfman and Cameron Hall for research assistance;
Henry Hale for useful comments; and Mark Kramer for his blunt criticism,
valuable guidance, generous assistance with archival sources, and witty e-mail
correspondence.
136
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